25 Nov, 2019 | The Week in Tax
- More on Inland Revenue CRS initiative
- The future of tax
- Why did the Tax Working Group’s CGT proposal fail?
Transcript
This week, an update on Inland Revenue’s Common Reporting Standard initiative, the Future of Tax and what went wrong with introducing a capital gains tax.
I spoke recently of Inland Revenue’s new initiative on the Common Reporting Standard on Automatic Exchange of Information or CRS as it’s commonly referred to. This is where Inland Revenue has received details of upwards of 700,000 accounts from overseas tax authorities. It is now working its way through that list of information it’s received and has started to send out some letters to people where it considers there has been either under declaration or non-declaration of income.
I’ve found out a bit more about what’s going on with this initiative, and it’s a little bit concerning how it’s being approached. So far Inland Revenue has sent out approximately 4,000 letters to various individuals with the latest batch of letters going out in the last couple of weeks, in fact.
But it seems to be slightly indiscriminate in its approach, I’m hearing reports of transitional residents who don’t have to report overseas income, receiving such letters and then having to spend time on it.
The information that’s been sent is for the period to 30th June 2018, and there’s another set of information coming for the period to 30th June 2019 very shortly. And apparently Inland Revenue is asking people to reconcile the numbers it’s received with what’s in their tax returns, because there are sometimes big discrepancies.
[Sometimes] the reasons for those discrepancies are because the taxpayer has returned income under a special regime, such as the foreign investment fund regime or the financial arrangements regimes. The financial arrangements regime, as you may recall, deals with income on an accrual basis and brings into account unrealised foreign exchange gains.
So naturally, there are going to be significant differences between what’s reported [to Inland Revenue], the actual amount of interest paid by an overseas financial institution and what’s been reported a taxpayer. So, it’s a little bit disconcerting to hear Inland Revenue taking that approach.
One other thing that has emerged is that Inland Revenue is expecting where someone has not been compliant, [that is] has not disclosed income for whatever reason, people to make disclosures for what’s called the open years, or not time barred [tax years]. This is usually four income tax years prior to the current year to 31st March 2019 for which a return is due. So that means that someone will have to be filing income tax returns covering the period from 1st of April 2014 onwards.
Just an aside on that. If Inland Revenue does feel that there’s been deliberate evasion, where someone was receiving, say, substantial amounts of income and they really should’ve known they ought to have been returning this, it always has the right where there is tax evasion or fraud at stake to go further back than the usual four year period.
I’ll keep you up to date on this developing story, as they say in the news. There’s going to be some confusion. If you have been compliant it’s not a problem. But it is a bit of a headache trying to find out exactly what Inland Revenue is after. And if you’ve not been compliant, come forward and get it sorted out.
Currently, I’m at the Chartered Accountants Australia New Zealand Annual Tax Conference in Auckland.
It’s always interesting to see the developing trends in tax and catch up with colleagues. Several papers have been very, very interesting talking about the future of tax. Incidentally, because the larger organisations such the Big Four accounting firms and larger law firms that dominate attendance at this conference there’s a fairly international tax and transfer pricing aspect for many of the sessions.
But because of the OECD’s recent tax initiatives I talked about last week, there’s very some interesting papers to be seen on this topic. Something one presenter talked about was that in some ways this development towards a global minimum tax rate may not be the sort of silver bullet to put an end to aggressive tax planning by multinationals some people might think it does. It does represent, as the present pointed out, a threat to the tax sovereignty of jurisdictions around the world. And that is something that hasn’t really been talked about too much.
Traditionally each country had its own taxing rights for activities [carried out] within the jurisdiction. Of course, the digital economy has just basically demolished that old precept which was designed almost one hundred years ago. Essentially, they’re basically now obsolete. But what’s coming and is still being debated may mean that countries have to accept that because of the way economies are now structured the taxing rights are going to change.
And here’s the thing, New Zealand is a small economy basically at the edge of the world on these matters. And to a large extent we will have little say as to what happens, how we can apply tax rules and what our cut, so to speak, of this digital economy tax take will be. And that’s something to really think about.
On the other hand, New Zealand tax officials are actually quite heavily involved in [this OECD process]. The Minister of Revenue and Minister of Finance both spoke at the conference. They gave an interesting political take on matters (they took questions as well).
Both of them singled out Carmel Peters of Inland Revenue for her work within the OECD. Carmel is in fact recognised as one of the top 100 most influential women in the tax community worldwide. This is a fantastic achievement when you consider how small New Zealand is for someone to be held in that regard.
This is a by-product of New Zealand’s Generic Tax Policy Process which is regarded very well worldwide and how co-operative tax professionals and Inland Revenue are in developing and implementing tax policy. So that’s encouraging. We may yet be effectively getting some crumbs at the table, but maybe we’re going to be helping set the table, so to speak.
Another paper that caught my eye, which is very interesting and something I’ve also talked about in past podcasts, is what’s happening in indirect taxes, and GST in particular. The guts of it is governments are really moving to basically disintermediate the tax professionals. That is, they’re going to cut out the middleman.
In some jurisdictions – China, India were mentioned – they are setting up a GST system or its equivalent where GST registered persons can only operate if they basically have a central government approved software where all transactions are automatically recorded and sent back up to and through this software to the tax authority. So, there’s no longer a question of gathering information, preparing a tax return and then filing it after a certain period time. Basically, everything’s going real time. And that’s actually not surprising given the way the Cloud technology is developing.
But it has put Inland Revenue and the Australian Tax Office at a little bit of a disadvantage compared to these other jurisdictions and the likes of Sweden, where, as I’ve previously mentioned, all credit and cash registers are centrally linked. The ATO and Inland Revenue are a little bit behind the game on this, but as the presenter noted, although they may not be pursuing this trend at the moment, on the other hand they’re probably ahead of many of the new jurisdictions in their ability to analyse the data they do receive.
And that’s something people should always be aware of, that Inland Revenue now has greatly enhanced capabilities. And it is almost certainly running its eye over the data it’s receiving, watching for the transactions which a café may not be ringing through.
By the way, this presenter was from Australia and after he paid in cash for a coffee, he wasn’t given a GST receipt even though he requested one, which as he rather wryly said “I didn’t know that New Zealand’s GST system operated like that”. But what’s going on there is almost certainly a case of tax evasion.
And finally, Robin Oliver and Geof Nightingale who were both on the Tax Working Group gave their views on went wrong with the attempted introduction of a capital gains tax.
Both were very clear that the political process of managing the introduction of a capital gains tax was badly handled right from the get-go. Furthermore, the design probably adopted a too purist approach. [Robin Oliver highlighted a few of the differences between the proposals and how Australia designed its CGT].
And the combination of an overly pure design, a poorly managed process in terms of selling a capital gains tax and its potential benefits meant that it really was quite a derailed process. As Robin noted the stars had to align for it come through. And they didn’t align at all, so it fell over badly.
What they also talked about is, well, what happens next? Fortunately, the government’s books are in surplus and the fiscal strains of superannuation and rising health care costs for the elderly are still some years down the path. But both thought that in 20 years’ time, the issue of capital gains tax will be back. And both Geof and Robin said that we have a significant asset class in land which is under taxed and that is not sustainable long term.
So that is a matter which will continue to be debated. We’ve got an election coming up and there was some commentary in the room about what is going to be the tax policy of the government going forward. There’s some talk, for example, about rejigging the rates and maybe increasing the top tax rate.
All that’s in the future. And we shall just have to wait and see.
And finally, just like a quick shout out to all the listeners and readers I’ve met at the conference so far. Thank you all for your kind comments and suggestions for topics and guests. Please keep them coming.
I’ll have more about the CAANZ tax conference next week. In the meantime, that’s it for The Week In Tax. I’m Terry Baucher and you can find this podcast on my website www.baucher.tax or wherever you get your podcasts, please send me your feedback and tell your friends and clients. And until next time have a great week. Ka kite āno.
18 Nov, 2019 | The Week in Tax
- Property developers and a still too common GST mistake
- EU proposes sharing credit card data to counter tax fraud
- OECD proposes minimum global tax rate as part of BEPS initiative
Transcript
This week, a common and often very expensive GST mistake. The European Union ramps up its anti-fraud fight with a massive data sharing initiative, and the OECD suggests a global minimum tax.
Property developers provide a rich source of work for tax advisers and for Inland Revenue. That is because of the importance of property to the economy as a whole, but also in that they are often remarkably careless about the tax consequences of a transaction. This is probably a character flaw in that a developer sees an opportunity and knows they need to move quickly to maximise the opportunity. They therefore often go charging into a project without having someone on hand sweeping up the bits and pieces to make sure that all the i’s are dotted, and t’s are crossed.
In my experience, a key distinction between developers who fail and those who are successful is often the successful ones make sure that they have a team around them that does look after all the bits and pieces and the necessary legal frame, legal and tax frameworks to ensure the projects go ahead.
How this often manifests itself is that a developer might come across a residential property which is ripe for development and will make a bid for the property and purchase it. This is where the very common tax problem may emerge if the developers aren’t careful. If the developer purchases the property in the wrong entity, either personally or in a company or a trust which is actually used for development purposes.
At some point down the track, the developer’s lawyer or the accountant might say that property shouldn’t be in that entity and we need to get it into the proper development company. The developer often responds “Well, just deal with it. Get it into the appropriate entity”. And what will happen more frequently than it should happen is that a second transfer is made from the developer or the wrong entity to the correct entity.
And then the new entity goes and claims a GST input tax credit. For example, a residential property worth say $575,000 residential property was bought and was then transferred at a later date to the correct development company, which tries to claim an input tax credit of $75,000. Inland Revenue will turn it down.
The reason why it would turn it down is a provision in the GST Act, section 3A(3)(a). Now this provision has been in place since October 2000 and it is quite astonishing that 19 years on this issue keeps arising. Why?
What this provision exists to do is to stop people buying a property when no GST was paid. For example, a residential property bought from someone who’s not GST registered, holding it and then selling it at an inflated price to a GST registered entity, which then claims the input tax credit. This was something that was going on and was eventually put a stop to by the introduction of this provision in October 2000.
And the way it works is simply to say that if the transaction involves a sale between associated parties, the amount of the GST that can be claimed by the recipient party, the developing company in this case, is limited to the amount of GST paid by the original purchaser. So, if the purchaser buys from a non-GST registered person a residential property and then on sells it to a GST registered person no GST input tax can be claimed on the purchase because no GST was paid by the original purchaser of the property.
Now this is, as I said, a very common mistake I keep encountering. It’s a reminder to all people involved in the property industry to be careful when buying property to make sure that you have the correct entity settle on the transaction with all the necessary paperwork in place. Too often developers are keen to get something done and then buy in the wrong entity just to get the deal done. And unwinding that transaction is either impossible or proves very expensive. So that’s a word to the wise. But I still find it astonishing that this is an issue I’ve been dealing with repeatedly for 19 years.
A credit card trap
Moving on it’s been a busy week in the international tax world. I’ve spoken in past podcasts about the international efforts to address tax evasion and fraud. And this week, the European Union announced an initiative to counter e-commerce VAT(GST) fraud, which is estimated to be about costing 5 billion euros a year in the European Union.
From January 2024, credit card and direct debit providers will be obliged to provide member state tax authorities with data about certain payment details from cross-border sales. The anti-fraud Eurofisc Network will then analyse this data for potential fraud. This is another part of the massive information sharing programmes which are now common to international tax such as FATCA and the Common Reporting Standards on Automatic Exchange of Information.
Inland Revenue has been operating something similar to this for some time. The most notorious example I encountered was a family here had still kept a credit card issued by a UK bank. The mother wanted to come out and visit them and have a holiday in New Zealand. So, what she did was she put money into the credit card in the UK and they then used it for the only time to hire a camper van.
Inland Revenue found the transaction and knew that this was a credit card transaction that was made by a New Zealand tax resident. It issued a “Please explain” letter. And that turned out to be a very costly matter because in fact the son had made a pension transfer which got picked up and tax paid.
What’s notable is that Inland Revenue’s older computer system was able to track and find that credit card transaction. But following Business Transformation what will Inland Revenue’s computers be capable of tracking? It will be interesting to see. But the warning is that if you use a credit card issued by an overseas bank in New Zealand, Inland Revenue will come asking questions.
Tackling tax aribtrage
And finally, another very significant development in overseas tax. This is part of the ongoing work of the OECD/G20 Base Erosion and Profit Shifting initiative (BEPS). The OECD secretariat last Friday issued a discussion document on what’s termed the Global Anti Base Erosion proposal under Pillar Two.
I spoke on a previous podcast about the Pillar One initiative. The references to pillars, by the way, is because these proposals represent significant changes to the international tax architecture, hence the reference to pillars.
Now this Global Anti-Base Erosion (GloBE) Proposal is really quite significant and worth quoting at length. According to the press release it
“seeks to comprehensively address the remaining BEPS challenges by ensuring that the profits internationally operating businesses are subject to a minimum rate of tax. A minimum tax rate on all income reduces the incentive for taxpayers to engage in profit shifting and establishes a floor for tax competition amongst jurisdictions.”
The press release goes on to note that
“global action is needed to stop a harmful race to the bottom on corporate taxes, which risks shifting the burden of taxes onto less mobile bases and actually may pose a particular risk for developing countries with small economies.”
And this has been something that’s been brewing for a long time now. The way that international multinationals have been using tax competition, encouraging countries to cut their tax rates and also looking to minimise their tax bills through shifting profits into low tax jurisdictions. The OECD proposals are a huge step forward and there’s a lot more to consider.
Things are now happening very rapidly in this space. The timeline for submissions on this particular Pillar 2 proposal is Monday 2nd December. There will be a public consultation meeting the following Monday 9th December in France. And the G20 is saying it wants a solution on the whole matter delivered by the end of 2020. So, stay tuned for what is a remarkably fast changing environment.
Well, that’s it for The Week in Tax. I’m Terry Baucher and you can find this podcast on my website www.baucher.tax or wherever you get your podcasts. Please send me your feedback and tell your friends and clients. And until next time have a great week. Ka kite āno.
30 Oct, 2019 | The Week in Tax
This week I take a look at Inland Revenue’s annual report – Download it
- How much additional tax did it raise?
- Who is it sharing information with?
- How did it do against its own performance measures?
Transcript
This week: “He kupu i tō mātou Kaikōmihana”, that’s Te Reo for “a word from the Commissioner”. I’m taking a look at Inland Revenue’s annual report for the year ended 30th June 2019.
Each year, every government department prepares an annual report for its minister and for the reporting lines to Parliament. These will set out its activities in the previous 12 months, its performance against agreed measures and also include its financial statements.
Inland Revenue’s is a treasure trove of information as you can imagine, a lot of detail to poke through here. And in fact, there is so much in this I could probably spend two or three podcasts on the matter. Instead, what I’m going to do this week is start with some headline numbers about Inland Revenue itself, the tax it collects and the data it shares and then finish with some observations about the state of the organisation itself.
The report is grouped around five areas. They are “Making It Easier for Customers”, “Helping Meet People Meet Their Obligations”, “Managing Ourselves Well”, “Governance and Management” and the biggie, “How We Performed”, a sort of NCEA assessment of Inland Revenue.
Big budget, big staff levels
Now Inland Revenue was given $847.5 million in appropriations for the year 2018-19 to spend and it actually finished up spending $828 million of that. The bulk of it goes to what it calls “Services for customers”, $616 million. Then the other areas that receives money are policy advice, $11 million, services to other agencies, $6 million and the big one, Business Transformation, $215 million.
It spent about 97% of its budget. And it is saying in one of the headline items that the Commissioner points out in ther report is that through Business Transformation to date, it’s released $60 million in administration savings and improved compliance outcomes as a result by raising additional revenue of about $90 million.
So to achieve that result Inland Revenue has just over 5,000 staff as of 30th June 2019, now that is down 800 since 2015 and about 90% are full time now. The average age is 44.6 which is quite old, I think. And a really interesting point here is that 65% of all its staff are female, but, and women will not be surprised to see this, is that 50% of all managers are male. One of Inland Revenue’s metrics is trying to improve on that matter.
But there’s been a fair amount of churn through its staff. I mean 938 staff left during the year, which is a near 20% loss. Now, they hire people as well, and that’s something that I’ll pick up on later on. So, it’s got a lot of money to deliver services. But a fair chunk of that $200 million is in part of the Business Transformation, which has been its main focus.
“The one that takes”
Anyway, for the year it collected $77.9 billion of tax revenue. Now included in that is nearly $985 million of tax differences. It identified this as part of its audit activities and investigation activities. That is a fairly significant number and we will see more of that going on.
But Inland Revenue, its main focus through the year quite frankly, has been managing its transformation to implement its so-called Business Transformation. And the key thing here was Release Three, the third stage of its transformation, which happened in April. That was when it moved over Pay As You Earn and also was the stage where it was automatically issuing refunds and assessments for taxpayers.
That as you are probably well aware, put huge strain on its resources. The report notes on page 31, “We received 41% of all calls for the year between April and June 2019.” This was over 1.6 million calls compared with 1.4 million for the same period previously in 2018. I will say that they suffered a disruption because of the having to evacuate the office in Palmerston North, the call centre there, because it was found to be earthquake prone.
But quite apart from all the calls that received, people also quite reasonably turned up at their offices and the Manukau office had more than a thousand visits on some days. Many people also then went online with massive numbers of people were hitting the online system. Between 26th of April when the system went live and the end of June, there were 16.9 million login to its myIR system, an increase of 90%, or nearly double from the same period in 2018. On its busiest day, there were almost 500,000 logins, so the system put itself under some strain, but Inland Revenue feels it managed with that. It’s a matter of debate whether you think that, but there’s no doubt it was an ambitious call on an ambitious project and I would expect that next year it should run a little bit more smoothly.
Interestingly, it’s now saying that 88.8% of all returns were filed digitally up from 83% in previous years and that 86.8% of tax payments were made on time, which is down from 87.9% and this is a measure that I think Inland Revenue needs to have a closer look at because it has a penalty system. But we do know that the payment on time rate between 85 and 87% is no better than other tax agencies that don’t charge late payment penalties, and this has been a bane of my life. I think it’s clogged up the system and it’s particularly noticeable when you look at what happens with child support debt. You have a penalty system. It’s not working. It’s been clearly not working both by its own standards and judged internationally and yet we still persist with it.
Talking of tax debt, at 30th June 2019 Inland Revenues’ tax debt, excluding student loans and child support stood at $3.5 billion, up 13% from 2018 when it was $3.1 billion. That’s after writing off $532 million of overdue debt and in the previous June 2018 year it wrote off $613 million.
The key thing of note here is that the level of GST debt is up 45% from $815 million to $1.18 billion and the amount of Pay As You Earn is also up 24% from $375 million to $466 million. They’re explaining that that rise in overall debt being the result of a number of factors including late filing penalties and late payment penalties, interest in default assessments.
Is the penalties system working?
That all just bears out the point I’ve just made, if people aren’t paying on time and we’re hammering with penalties and we’re still not collecting it, maybe Inland Revenue needs to rethink its approach about those penalties. Because you can see that in child support, the amount of child support debt is actually down a little bit in June 2019 to $2.2 billion, but $1.6 billion of that represents penalties.
As part of its efforts to collect Child Support, Inland Revenue’s obtained four arrest warrants from the courts, of which one was executed and so far, it’s collected $11,000 as a result of that. And then it’s looked at another 14 summonses for examination of financial means and 20 charging orders against property and warrants. Key focus here is chasing down people who are overseas who owe child support and under its reciprocal arrangement with Australia, collected about $46.4 million from Australia.
It actually sent $14.7 million over to Australia. And this information sharing is one of the things that Inland Revenue does a lot of, which people don’t realise here. For example, the repot talks about passport information sharing programme with the Department of Internal Affairs and that resulted in 1,409 contact records match for parents who had a child support debt in 2018-2019. As a result, 120 customers made payments of over $234,000.
Information sharing
It sent plenty of information with the Australian Tax Office (ATO) in relation to student loan customers. They sent 149,000 requests to the ATO asking, “Can you tell us all about that?” And maybe that’s not doing as well as it should do because the level of overdue student loan debt is now $1.48 billion and that’s up 12% basically because of overseas-based student loan holders. In fact, they issued a couple of arrest warrants.
The information sharing goes not just to the ATO, it goes with WorkSafe is one area where it’s passed information to other agencies. And the big one, the one that people should be really aware of, and I’m starting to see come across my desk, is international compliance. Inland Revenue and New Zealand are part of the Common Reporting Standard or the initiative run by the OECD to counter offshore tax evasion. In September 2018 Inland Revenue swapped data with other tax agencies around the world. It sent out 600,000 account reports too other agencies saying “We have people here [with financial accounts] who have an overseas address or overseas tax information number, there’s 600,000 of them. In turn Inland Revenue received similar details about over 700,000 such accounts. You may recall that I’ve mentioned in a past podcast that Inland Revenue’s looking into this in more detail and that is just the tip of the iceberg, the 700,000 records to work through. That’s a lot of people. And I think quite a few more than what I’ve seen will be receiving a “Please tell us a bit more about your finances.”
Enforcing compliance
Talking about tax evasion and addressing additional compliance, Inland Revenue overall found discrepancies as I called it, of $985 million and its return on its investment was $7.54 per dollar. In other words, every dollar it put into its investigation activities, it got $7.54 back identified $985 million in total tax position differences. That involved over 12,305 cases.
There are some interesting snippets in here about high wealth individuals, that is people worth more than $50 million. According to Inland Revenue, high-wealth individual customers and their respective groups pay more than $700 million in income tax and collect over $1 billion of pay as you earn. So that’s a fairly significant amount of the over $80 billion of tax income.
This is a reasonably small group of people representing maybe 200-300 people in there, and Inland Revenue says they identified $44 million of discrepancies as a result of investigations into this area.
In the hidden economy, there’s some very interesting stuff in here. They found an additional revenue of about $109 million and that is they also found over fraudulent refunds and entitlements about another $30 million. But what’s interesting to see here is that the proportion of people saying that they participated in cash jobs is starting to fall slightly.
Fewer people are asking for this. When they started measuring this in 2011, 34% of people said they participate in a cash job. It’s now down to 27% but the level of people who said they were likely to ask for a cash price discount has gone from 27% and dropped to 16%. However, the number of people who said they would report themselves as being likely to participate in cash jobs, is 19%, same as 2018.
And here’s the big one though. Only 49% of people agreed in 2018 that cash jobs were acceptable, but that’s down from 72% in 2011. That’s one of those interesting measures that people point the finger at multinationals but are not averse to getting a bit of a discount for cash.
It’s the same thing, whether it’s tax avoidance by a multinational or flat-out tax evasion. You’re on the same spectrum. Well, the argument would be that tax avoidance is within the means of the law. Whereas tax evasion, taking a discount for cash isn’t. Anyway, it’s encouraging to see this improvement in behaviours there.
Bright-line test returns
And finally, the tax revenue they collected from property tax compliance that is looking at the Bright-line test, et cetera, had a return for investment of $9.58 per dollar. So that’s nearly 50% above its target of $6.42 per dollar. And that added another $109 million. And just on the Bright-line test Inland Revenue got in touch with a thousand taxpayers over their returns filed in the 2017 income year about the Bright-line test possibly applying.
So that’s a fair snippet of what Inland Revenue has done during the year. And there’s plenty more in the report to go through and I might pick out particular aspects in future podcasts.
The IRD has poor staff engagement
Well what about the state of the organisation itself? How did it perform against its measures? According to Inland Revenue it achieved 36 out of the 48 output performance targets for the year and that’s compared with 43 out of 50 in the 2017-18 year. Now where it fell down in its own measures is its services for customers when it met 28 of the 40. But it met all the other top performance targets for services to other agencies, policy advice and on Business Transformation.
But the area that concerns me is the staff engagement rate. I deal with Inland Revenue staff pretty much every day, and I deal with them at all levels. Those who are answering the phones, dealing with requests up to the policy officials. What I think the Revenue Minister and the Finance and Expenditure Committee should be concerned about is that the staff engagement by Inland Revenue’s own measure is a mere 29%.
That’s actually an improvement from the year to June 2018 when it was 27% and when this was first measured in the June 2017 year, it was 44% and even then that annual report noted that that was below the Australasian government average or expectation of 51%.
These measurements have only happened in the last three years. The 2016 report simply notes that staff engagement rose during the year. Now if its staff engagement rose during the year 2016 it implies that the staff engagement since the Business Transformation project really took off, which began in 2016 has halved to all intents and purposes. That is a major concern because it affects everyone in the system. Taxpayers, if Inland Revenue staff are of low morale, that feeds through to the rest of how they deal with us. The pressures they’re under and there’s wider implications for the government of underperformance in revenue collection. So I think this is a matter that the Commissioner of Inland Revenue, Inland Revenue management and the Minister of Revenue and The Finance and Expenditure Select Committee should all be asking very hard questions as to what’s going on here.
The staff turnover in Inland Revenue has been quite dramatic over the past five years the organisation is losing on average just under 700 people a year and that’s a lot of experience to be walking out the door. And so from a base of 5,800 in 2015, you can say that two thirds of that, almost 60% of those that were there in 2015 would appear to have gone by now. That’s a massive turnover. The report notes that the turnover has decreased but it is expected to increase commenting, “Turnover turnover’s decreasing, reflecting the period of significant organizational changes occurred in 2017-18, as we work through further changes to reach our future operating model, we expect turnover is likely to increase.”
“Customers”? Really?
I don’t like being called a customer by Inland Revenue. It’s actually quite amusing to see the use of the word “customer” here in the report. The report refers to customers over 500 times, but taxpayers, merely 47 times. But as a stakeholder, as a tax agent and as a taxpayer, the performance of Inland Revenue is very dependent on the morale of its staff. And what I’m seeing here in this report and it continues a trend that has emerged in the last three reports is not good.
I have experienced that. When you’re talking with Inland Revenue staff, you can sense that they’re frustrated, they’re incredibly professional, they’re always professional. I know people will say, “I’ve had bad experiences with Inland Revenue,” but my experience is they’re wholly professional at all times, but they’re being asked to do a lot.
There’s now overtime back, and the report says it saw 740 odd people had to come in and work extra hours [as part of Release 3]. They shifted a whole pile of people from the investigation area to help with the phones. And that’s not something that should be a regular pattern. And so already pressured staff have been asked to do a lot and to see the staff engagement is just 29% is a major concern to me.
Well that’s it for the Week in tax. More next week. I’m Terry Baucher, and you can find this podcast on my website, www.baucher.tax or wherever you get your podcasts. Please send me your feedback and tell your friends and clients. Until next time, have a great week. Ka kite āno!
